Photo Scavenger Hunt by Dolores

I was lucky to have an exciting vacation this year and being the scrapbooker that I am, I took nearly 2,000 photos! I snapped the typical vacation photos of my daughter posing in front of monuments and beautiful landscapes…and even managed to get in a few photos myself. But I also took pictures for a scavenger hunt!

If you’ve never tried a photo scavenger hunt, I highly recommend doing so. They’re fun! We did a Disney scavenger hunt a few years ago and it was a great way for my daughter and me to look at the park in a new way. We shared the list and had fun seeing who could find what we needed from the list.

The travel section of our local newspaper hosts a scavenger hunt contest every summer and provides a checklist of things to hunt for. The main requirement is that you need to travel outside the local area so we were out of luck last year when our budget required a staycation. This particular scavenger hunt is designed for US road trips, but this summer we got to go to Costa Rica…definitely outside of our local area! Some items were easy, like “member(s) of traveling party in the water”, while others could be tricky, like “train or cable car not on tracks.” Some things were impossible, like an “election sign” because it wasn’t election time there. Luckily they provided a substitution list for overseas travelers and it was super easy to find a “US-based franchise with a sign in a foreign language”, WalMart, McDonalds, Wendy’s, KFC…take your pick in the large cities!

What I really like about photo scavenger hunts is ending up with pictures of things I might have overlooked. We walked through a park and would have photographed the monuments, but needing specific photos made us slow down and really explore the park. We found a “lion, real or not”, and a “tree with a trunk at least twice as wide as a member of our traveling party”…so I got my daughter to pose and checked two things off the list! Now we’ll both remember that park better with these photos and the giggles we shared are priceless.

Photo scavenger hunts don’t have to be limited to vacations. You can create your own for a fun family event and have teams go out with a list of things to find! One of our local zoos has one posted online that we did to engage my then 6-year old niece. She loved both competing like the big kids and getting to take the pictures! The internet is full of ideas to create your own and even some ready-made lists.

We didn’t get pictures of all the items on the checklist during our trip. From the back seat of a cab we did spot a train car restaurant as we turned a corner, but the camera wasn’t ready and we couldn’t stop to get that photo! And we never found a “funny or elaborate mailbox.” But we still had fun with it and I have more photos to scrap! I can even do a layout about the photo scavenger hunt!